Instructables member ganglion from England installed some LED stair lighting on his stairs. He built a custom DIY circuit that allows the lights to be dimmed. To make things a bit simpler he decided to only light every second step and simply run the wires on the edge of the stairs from top to bottom.

We have seen other stair lighting systems like this one that have the wires run in a small channel down the edge of the stairs. This allows the wires to be hidden without the need for drilling holes in the walls and fishing the wires in the walls to power.

“The bit I was pleased with was working out a circuit that lets you use the same pair of cables for the LED power and for the switch signal from the top box. By the time I decided I wanted both switches, I’d already soldered the LEDs (plus resistors) into a two core piece of mains flex, so getting the switch signal back down the cable to the main box took a bit of thought. In the end I found a way of shorting the power very briefly through a capacitor, and detecting the current pulse using a comparator. The signal from this goes to a toggle flipflop, which switches the power on and off.”